Islamabad:
Pakistani politicians loyal to jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan will forge an alliance with a little-known political group, his party said on Monday, after polls marred by allegations of manipulation failed to produce a clear winner.
Candidates backed by Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party won the most seats in this month's elections but were effectively sidelined as they were forced to stand as independents.
The military-backed Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) failed to secure a ruling majority but has forged a partnership with the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and a handful of smaller parties to form the next government.
However, PTI still hopes to win a majority by having its candidates join the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC), a registered political party whose chairman was the only one from the alliance of Islamic political and religious parties to win a seat.
“We have reached an agreement that our candidates for the provincial and national assembly will join the Sunni Ittehad Council,” PTI chairman Gohar Ali Khan told a news conference.
Successful PTI-backed candidates will send their applications to join the SIC this week to the Election Commission of Pakistan, which must approve the alliance.
If the commission endorses them, the alliance could be entitled to seats reserved for women and religious minorities and allocated based on election results.
“After this alliance, PTI will be in a position to form a government both in the provinces and at the centre,” Omar Ayub Khan, PTI's prime ministerial candidate, told the press conference, referring to the National Assembly.
There have been widespread allegations of vote fraud and manipulation of results after authorities switched off Pakistan's mobile phone network on election day and counting took more than 24 hours.
A senior bureaucrat announced at a news conference on Saturday that he had helped rig the February 8 election and that he would turn himself in to police.
“We turned the losers into winners, reversing the margins of 70,000 votes in 13 seats in the National Assembly,” said Liaqat Ali Chattha, commissioner of the garrison city of Rawalpindi, where the powerful army is headquartered.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a leading advocacy group, said after Chattha's announcement that the state bureaucracy's “involvement in manipulation in Pakistan is beginning to be exposed.”
Imran Khan's PTI held nationwide protests on Saturday against the alleged manipulation.
A small number of supporters took to the streets in major urban centres, with the largest gathering of around 4,000 people in the northern city of Peshawar.
Police arrested senior party member Salman Akram Raja and a dozen supporters in the central city of Lahore, where they surrounded the party headquarters, but said they were all released by late afternoon.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)